Warsaw, 1942–43
When the Nazi regime sealed 400,000 Jews inside the Warsaw Ghetto, 32-year-old social worker Irena Sendler faced a question no rulebook could answer: Do I obey the occupiers’ orders—or the voice that says every child is mine to protect?
Sendler chose the second voice. Armed with a forged nurse’s pass and carrying nothing more threatening than a thermometer, she entered the Ghetto daily, warning parents that a “typhus inspection” was coming. Then she posed a wrenching offer: “Trust me with your baby. You may never see them again—but they may live.”
Night after night she smuggled infants out in toolboxes, teens in burlap sacks, even sedated toddlers inside ambulance stretchers. Each child received a new Polish name and was hidden with convents, orphanages, or courageous families. To preserve their birthright, Sendler wrote every real name on cigarette-paper slips, sealed them in glass jars, and buried the jars under an apple tree—hoping to reunite families after the war.
In October 1943 the Gestapo arrested her. Bones broken, sentenced to death, she refused to betray a single child. Polish resistance fighters bribed a guard hours before her execution, leaving her dumped in a wooded ditch with a note: “You have been saved.” Sendler limped straight back to her mission under a new alias.
By war’s end she and her network had rescued roughly 2,500 children—an entire elementary-school’s worth of lives, and today about 40,000 descendants. When asked later why she risked everything, she shrugged: “I was taught that when you see a person drowning, you must try to save them, even if you cannot swim.”
Leadership takeaway: Moral choice often comes disguised as ordinary work. Sendler had no title, budget, or weapon—only a creed that children’s lives outrank any order. When principles are crystal-clear, courage stops feeling optional and starts feeling inevitable.